Excitement regarding the possibilities of the cloud has never been greater, and that sentiment shows no sign of reversing or plateauing in the foreseeable future. While there is plenty to be enthusiastic about regarding the various cloud deployment models that are well-established, such as multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, new approaches to cloud computing are also starting to emerge.
One of these, the distributed cloud, may be particularly intriguing to many enterprises going forward, due to its potential for minimizing latency and enabling more comprehensive control of cloud assets.
The term distributed cloud refers to when an enterprise uses public hybrid multi-cloud services—offered by a primary cloud service provider—that run in a variety of different locations. These may include the user's on-premises data center or edge locations, public cloud infrastructure, third-party data or colocation centers, or even the data centers of other cloud providers. Distributed cloud operations are managed by the originating provider from a single control plane, to bring consistency and cohesion to the deployment.
In a cloud deployment that operates as a distributed system, different clouds can serve different purposes. For example, one cloud might have meticulous security safeguards in place to house data that must be protected according to the stringent guidelines of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Another could be dedicated to supporting software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that an organization uses heavily, which require considerable bandwidth and need as low latency as possible to operate most effectively.
Gartner also notes that distributed cloud is the first cloud model that, in contrast to its predecessors, is defined by "the physical location of cloud-delivered services." Taking this approach enables organizations to operate more readily at the edge while losing none of the sprawl and scope that a multi-cloud framework allows.
Opting for the distributed cloud approach can potentially offer a number of significant benefits for enterprise operations. Notable examples include:
Utilizing the distributed cloud gives you the ability to leverage compute power and resources from multiple locations. This can allow for faster processing in essential operations—everything from customer relationship management (CRM) functionality to data analytics. Meanwhile, closer proximity to the edge means lower latency.
A distributed multi-cloud can also help you reduce downtime. Clouds can be cordoned off in local or semi-local subnets to alleviate the burden on the overall distributed network, thus reducing the likelihood of network failure.
Distributed cloud deployments offer considerable elasticity within each cloud, and provide scalability because entire clouds can be added and removed as necessary. Additionally, with distributed cloud, it's possible to expand the capacity of current infrastructure and enable edge computing without building out any additional physical infrastructure.
